Exploration of Heritage Conservation Issue with Volunteer Tourism

Abstract

The main motivation of the article is to explore one of the contemporary tourism movement; volunteer tourism and its role in heritage conservation. Modernist tourism activities have been criticized for their consumer and harmful effects on the host destinations by several scholars such as John Urry. Accordingly, relationships between ‘tourists’ and ‘host destinations’ are defined as consumer and resources in the modern world. However, the postmodern ‘volunteer tourism’ concept started to discuss with its concern about the conservation and development purposes of ‘travelers’ for their ‘experienced places’. Theoretically, Edward Soja express; standing points of modernism and postmodernism as well as effects of them to space from spatial, social, and cultural aspects. Through such expositions, this paper makes theoretical contributions about; differences between mass tourism and alternative tourism activities from the volunteer tourism perspective to figure out if the volunteer tourism movement is applicable for sustainable heritage conservation and development purposes.